Stepping into the breach - interview with actor Michael Hadley

Urging Jude Law’s Henry V to an intemperate and almost certainly illegal invasion of France in the hugely acclaimed West End production of Shakespeare’s most breast-beatingly jingoistic play is a once-a-night duty at present for actor Michael Hadley, a long-time resident of Charlbury.

The encouragement is given in a discourse on Salic Law placed in the mouth of the Archbishop of Canterbury. One of the Bard’s longest speeches, and immensely boring, it is almost always savagely cut and has been for this production in which director Michael Grandage rings down the curtain on a stellar five-play season at the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End. Earlier shows have featured Daniel Radcliffe, Judi Dench, David Walliams and Simon Russell Beale, among others.

Had Michael committed the speech to memory before the hatchet was swung? Happily not. The cut was made at the start of rehearsals, when he also learned that his part was to be ‘beefed up’ through the addition of a famous speech on peace scripted for the Duke of Burgundy and a conciliatory closing oration by the Queen of France. This means that Michael delivers the words, other than those of the Chorus, which are spoken both at the beginning and at the end of this powerful evening of theatre.

“In between there has been a change in the character,” he says. “He starts off as politically conniving but by the end he has been influenced by what he has seen on the battlefield. He has become a man of peace which, of course, is what an archbishop should be.” Michael is talking to The Oxford Times in his dressing room before curtain up on a mid-week performance of the play. The black and brown furry ball he will soon be taking down to a full-cast warm-up on stage strikes a somewhat incongruous note beside the cluttered mirrored desk of his colleague Ron Cook, who plays the swaggering braggart Pistol. Both are veterans of previous Michael Grandage productions in his days at the Donmar Warehouse — a 2010 King Lear with Sir Derek Jacobi and a Hamlet of 2009 that also played on Broadway, with Jude Law in the title role.

It seems safe to assume, then, that Michael and the star get on. “Absolutely,” he says. “Jude is lovely. He has great charisma and no status to bother about. He is very much as the character is in the play.”

This has rather been the opinion of critics, too, including The Oxford Times’s. Its reviewer (the present writer) also praised Michael’s work in the play, not the first instance of his lavishing compliments on the actor. His Prospero in last year’s Tempest at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, was judged a “magisterial portrait, setting the pattern where respect for the glories of the text are concerned”.

Michael, now 65, has enjoyed a long and varied career in the theatre, having taken his first steps on to the stage in plays performed at Edward VI School in Lichfield. “One of them, in fact, was Henry V, in which I played Henry.” Born in Walsall, Staffordshire, he was of three children of an ex-Typhoon pilot, later Black Country factory boss, and his housewife wife (“as married women usually were in those days”). There was no tradition of theatre in the family. His brother grew up to be a civil engineer, while his sister joined a public relations company.

Michael himself had wanted to become a cricketer, “but doing the school plays was something that turned my head round”. He also worked with the National Youth Theatre in two plays, one of them Peter Terson’s seminal study of football hooliganism, Zigger Zagger.

His two years of drama study were at the Bristol Old Vic School, where he found himself among a number of big names in the making. They included Jeremy Irons, Tim Pigott-Smith, Simon Cadell and Christopher Biggins “who, as you can imagine, was the life and soul of our year”.

Inspirational teaching was supplied by Nat Brennan, who was in charge of the school and, in Michael’s words, “had done the lot”, from lighting design to theatre management.

Michael prospered enough to be one of those selected to join the Old Vic Company at the end of the course, as an acting assistant stage manager, “that is general dogsbody”. Any acting roles were tiny, including that of Bilton, in Shaw’s Major Barbara. “The rest of the cast fell about laughing when Val May, who ran the company, gave me a note on how to play the part.”

His next move was to the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and then to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre where bigger roles beckoned. They included over two years those of Lysander and Duke Angelo in Shakepeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure for Measure, Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and both Estragon and Vladimir (at different times) in the same writer’s Waiting for Godot.

In 1971 came his first major work in television, with the lead role in Colin Welland’s The Catherine Wheel. “Unfortunately, this was the first of his plays that died the death.” Two years later, in Birmingham, Michael met his wife-to-be Susan, who was about to begin English studies at Bedford College, London. The couple married in 1976, moving to a house in Bow, London, where Susan became a teacher at the National Childbirth Trust.

Four children, George, Ben, Jack and Lucy arrived over the decade from 1980, by the end of which the family had left London for the cleaner air and easier traffic of Charlbury. “Ours is not a typical Cotswold house,” says Michael, “but a red-brick converted smock factory on the outskirts of town.” Susan now travels each day to work as a district nurse in Bampton.

The children were all at school in Chipping Norton. Though involved in the local drama group, none followed their father into the theatre. George is now a graphic designer, Ben a construction manager, Jack a trainee primary school teacher and Lucy a parliamentary assistant to one of Birmingham’s Labour MPs, Richard Burden.

Through the years, parts have continued to roll in for Michael in sufficient quantity, as he says, for him to go on paying the mortgage. They have included plenty in those reliable one-time sources of actors’ income, television’s Casualty and The Bill. Audiences at Oxford Playhouse have seen him in many touring productions with the Cambridge Theatre Company, including Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, Peter Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise and Congreve’s The Way of the World.

He has made impressive contributions to the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company, including playing both dukes in As You Like It and parts in the famous touring production of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and in Coriolanus, the final production (starring Janet Suzman and Timothy West) before the rebuilding of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.